Jeremy’s Tophunder №10: Inglourious Basterds

9 min readJun 7, 2020

Quentin Tarantino is well-known for playing around with narrative structure, but he did something in Inglourious Basterds that is quite different from his other films, and frankly, immensely different from the norms of modern-day Hollywood.

In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino went -long-.

I don’t mean the movie ran long (it’s official runtime is 153 minutes, which is certainly on the longer end, but not significantly so), I mean the scenes ran long. He sat us in a few of those scenes for much, much longer than just about any other filmmaker would. As I watched it, I counted and tracked how long each “scene” was, and even though I knew there were fewer scenes (and longer scenes) than the average movie, the numbers I came up with still surprised me.

An “average” screenplay (which is a ridiculous notion, but we’ll run with it for now) runs somewhere in the neighborhood of 100–120 pages, which roughly equates to a 100–120 minute movie. An “average” scene is probably 2–3 pages long. Simple math here will tell you that most screenplays will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 or 60 scenes, each lasting a few minutes.

Depending on how you define a “scene” (for example, is a montage one scene or several scenes?), Inglourious Basterds could have as few as 15 or 20 scenes, but a more strict definition would say it has probably around 30. Even still, that’s an insanely low number for how long the movie is. And they’re long. Like, really long. The opening scene at the farmhouse runs just under 20 minutes. Shoshana having lunch with the German officers runs about 13 minutes. The bar scene outside Paris runs 24 minutes long. It’s pure insanity.

The movie is broken into five chapters, and each chapter is rather self-contained. It’s just a wonderfully arranged story, introducing all the relevant characters in their elements and wrapping a nice bow on each storyline. Really, each chapter could be it’s own stand-alone short film. Luckily for us, Tarantino shoved them all together and ended up with an amazing movie.

I had never heard of Christoph Waltz prior to Inglourious Basterds, and I assume neither had you. He worked mostly in Germany prior to his work here, and I’ve literally never heard of most of the movies in his filmography between 1979 (his first role) and 2009. Seeing him here was like if Tom Brady had played Canadian football for 10 years before coming to join the NFL. Like, where the hell has this guy been and why have his talents been wasted? He absolutely dominates the movie, speaking four different languages and somehow straddles the line between adorable small-talk artist and merciless Nazi SS officer, and he’s able to flip the switch back and forth seemingly at will.

Quentin Tarantino has been remarkably consistent with writing and directing characters that go on to immense critical acclaim and often major awards recognition — by my count, a whopping nine actors have been nominated for Oscars in just 10 directorial efforts (John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, Robert Forster in Jackie Brown, Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, Waltz in Django Unchained, Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hateful Eight, and Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood). And that doesn’t even count any of the performances that almost certainly should have been nominated and it remains rather inexplicable that they weren’t (like Thurman in Kill Bill Vol. 2 or Leo in Django Unchained), or nominations for other major awards like the Golden Globes or BAFTAs.

Somehow, through all of that, I think Waltz’s performance as Hans Landa is the best acting performance in any Tarantino movie ever, and more than that, I don’t even think it’s particularly close. Maybe it’s a function of just not having even seen him before, so everything seemed fresh and new, but I really can’t describe how incredible it was to watch him for the first time. Tarantino has said that he was genuinely worried that he wasn’t going to be able to find anyone to play Landa, and may have ended up just scrapping the project altogether. He flirted with the idea of casting Leo, but eventually decided he wanted a native German speaker. He called the part “unplayable” due to it necessitating speaking multiple languages. Waltz eventually fell into his lap and suddenly the whole movie worked. If I ever put together my list of my favorite acting performances of all time, Waltz would certainly compete for the top spot.

His introduction, in the movie’s first scene (the aforementioned 20-minute dairy farm conversation) is absolutely spectacular. Here it is in full:

The beauty of this scene is shared between both Tarantino and Waltz. Tarantino’s dialogue and character construction builds tension at every turn, and the scene turns into almost a ticking clock. As soon as you realize that the family Waltz is looking for is under the floorboards, you know it must only be a matter of time before they’re discovered. But as far as we can see, this Nazi officer is a gregarious, smiling, charismatic guy that actually seems compelling. But then, around the 16:10 mark of that clip above, the camera slowly starts to pull in on his face. His soft smile disappears, and is replaced by a stone-faced, intense complexion, and you suddenly realize — oh, -this- is the villain. This is not a guy who works for the bad guys, this is The Bad Guy.

Waltz is so magnificent that he overshadows a number of other great acting performances in the movie. Denis Menochet (as Perrier LaPadite in the movie’s opening scene) is fantastic. Daniel Bruhl was great in his first major American role. Melanie Laurent was also exceptional. August Diehl was awesome in the bar scene as the Nazi major that hoses the Basterds deception. Even someone like Diane Kruger, who I wouldn’t normally think is an actor worth writing home about, brought a few really strong scenes and held her own opposite Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, and Waltz.

Not only is Basterds my favorite Tarantino movie, I actually think its his best movie. Resevoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are still the most popular answers, I’d have to assume, but there’s an element to Basterds that makes it different. It’s just so ambitious of a project that I can’t help but be amazed that he pulled it off. He made a World War II movie, but shot it like a Western, and had absurdly long scenes of drawn out dialogue, most of which wasn’t even in English. Only about 30 percent of the dialogue in the movie is in English, and several major characters never speak English at all. I’ve never enjoyed a movie with subtitles more, and it somehow doesn’t feel like a movie that I have to read.

It’s just incredible to me how fun a movie that Tarantino was able to make despite it living inside the one of the most complex and delicate conflicts of 20th century history. This isn’t the conversation surrounding the movie today, but at the time, Tarantino was highly criticized for what people perceived as his lampooning of World War II and the Holocaust. I never totally bought those criticisms, just because so much of the worldwide film industry (but especially Hollywood) involves re-imagining and re-contextualizing our own history through fictional stories. I don’t see Basterds as making a mockery of World War II, I see it as Tarantino intended it — a cathartic re-writing of history to depict the Nazi high command getting what should have came to them. And the movie is an absolute blast to watch, and to re-watch. I’ve never had so much fun watching a World War II movie, and that includes a World War II movie I have ranked higher on this list — Saving Private Ryan. I like Saving Private Ryan more than I like Basterds (barely, I think), for a variety of reasons, but I can’t deny that Basterds is way more fun to watch.

There are a few cool Easter Eggs hidden inside the movie. For one, the original title of the movie was going to be Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France. That title was eventually re-purposed for Chapter 1 of the movie, and then obviously re-purposed again for Tarantino’s love letter to Hollywood in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Beyond that, though, Brad Pitt’s character attends the Nazi film premier as an Italian stuntman named Enzo Gorlami. Then, 10 years later, he plays a stuntman in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Another fun little thing — all of the actors who portray the Basterds are also known for pursuits other than acting. Many are screenwriters, but some are also musicians or visual artists.

I could honestly write 15,000 words about Inglourious Basterds — there is just so much that I love about this movie and so much to unpack. I could write for hours just on the two drawn out tension scenes (the opening at the dairy farm, and the basement bar) and how the positions of power switch back and forth in each scene. Inside an already incredible movie, Tarantino directed two Alfred Hitchcock movies and shoved them into his story. The tension is so beautifully written and carefully arranged, and both scenes stand out as among my favorite movie scenes of all time. Perhaps my favorite single moment, however, is the movie’s final image. After Brad Pitt carves a swastika into Christoph Waltz’s forehead, we cut to a reverse shot with Pitt looking over his handiwork, and he says “I think this just might be my masterpiece.” It’s a rather heavy-handed allusion from Tarantino, but it’s also very deserved. Inglourious Basterds -is- Tarantino’s masterpiece. It’s a movie with an astoundingly high degree of difficulty, and he pulls off every move with brilliance and ease.

It’s a World War II movie where most of the scenes involve people just sitting and talking. Think about that for a second. Sure, there are the classic Tarantino homages and flourishes, there’s the signature cartoonish violence in the end, but the overwhelming majority of the movie is just dialogue with very little action. Think about how hard it is to make that a good movie, let alone a great one. Tarantino’s mastery of dialogue was at its absolute best in Basterds. For one of the best dialogue writers ever, their best work is always going to stand out, and it does here.

Inglourious Basterds is one of the few movies on my list that I genuinely wouldn’t change a thing about. I don’t think it’s perfect — I think Tarantino tends to be very full of himself and it can sometimes distract you from the core of the movie. But I enjoy those self-referential homages and asides that he can’t help but throw into his movies. All things considered, I thought here he was at his most restrained. To this point in time, it was the first movie he had written with a (mostly) straightforward sense of time and narrative structure. He didn’t jumble the story and tell it out of order, he just divided things up into chapters. Inglourious Basterds could have gone way out of control, but it somehow didn’t. It’s my favorite Tarantino movie, and the best Tarantino movie, and it’s my 10th-favorite movie of all time.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

10. Inglourious Basterds

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige